Random bits of Code Hacking

Wed, Aug 3, 2005 with tags f-spot , code , gnome , mythtv , hacking , research

So it’s been a while since I wrote what I’ve been hacking away on. The biggest thing is that I’ve been trying to add license support to F-spot. It’s not that difficult to do, but the architecture doesn’t support changing the schema all that much. The thought is that there will be another category of things like tags, just licenses. Right now each photo can have a single license associated with it.

Each of the licenses then has a set of properties that are basically taken from the Creative Commons licenses. In the future, this will allow you to select only those photos that allow commercial use, or something like that. Maybe when we combie it with the Flickr export, your photos will automagically keep their licenses. All sorts of neato possibilities. I just need to find to hack on it some more. Research is burying me.

On the research front, I’ve been hacking away at my scripts to automatically build social networks for OSS projects. It’s all very cool. Give it a URL and it just goes out and builds lots of useful information from these networks. I’ve been integrating information from a copy of the GNOME CVS repository that I recently got. GNOME is a MASSIVE project. There’s about 500,000 different files in the complete CVS repository. That’s a lot of analysis. It’s even bogging down our dual opteron server. Yikes.

On the home front, I’ve been exploring how to get nice DVDs burned from movies that I’ve recorded with MythTV. Unfortunately, my 200GB hard disk is nearly full and I need to rememdy that soon. Right now I’ve been deleting crappy stuff like King Ralph, but I’ve got a finite number of crappy movies. It’s probably more practical to start buring TV shows to DVD. But I need to burn a lot of Simpsons episodes to DVD to start freeing up space. Of course, the other option is to wait and get a bigger hard drive. I think I’m a little biased. The last one I picked up for $35 (after $60 in rebates) and it was 200GB. I don’t want to get anything that’s a worse deal. I saw that Hitachi just came out with 500GB SATA drives. Maybe this is the excuse I’ve needed to pick an SATA controller.

Of course, I might be able to skew this to say that I need a new MythTV box. After all, I’ve got a pcHDTV card in there that can’t even be used because the computer is too slow (and I haven’t put up an antenna yet). Also, the system randomly gets overloaded and crashes. If I were to purchse a nice AMD Athlon 64x2 4800 that would never happen. Of course, I won’t be able to afford one of those until they’re in the $200 price range. Silly house sucking up all of our money. What do we need capital for?